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For Each Other

This Veterans Day reminds me of something I saw last May at an Army combat outpost in Sayedabad, an Afghan market town that lies among the apple and apricot orchards southwest of Kabul. Charlie Company of a battalion of the 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, was holding down a stretch of the Kabul-Kandahar highway where the Taliban had been extremely active. Security was improving along the highway, a few months in advance of the Afghan election, but the Taliban were still capable of intimidating the local Pashtun villagers and hitting American and Afghan patrols. The day I arrived in Sayedabad, by armored vehicle from a larger U.S. base, Charlie Company was holding a memorial service for two soldiers. There had been one suicide, but these were the brigade’s first killed in action on this deployment. More would come soon.

Staff Sergeant Esau Delapena and Sergeant Carlie Lee III were cut down a few days earlier in a close-range ambush while chasing an enemy fighter through a field surrounded by a heavily wooded grove. Lee had been hit first, and Delapena was killed instantly while rushing to help him. Specialist Don Ezra Cruz Plemons, a medic from Gainesville, Florida, reached them within seven or eight minutes. Lee was still breathing and asking for morphine. “He could feel the blood filling up in his stomach,” Plemons said. “ ‘I can’t breathe, I’m dying.’ ” Plemons and the others who had made it to the downed soldiers were taking fire while Plemons tried to revive Lee and Delapena using rescue breaths, although Delapena had no pulse. Lee fell unconscious, and he died on the medevac helicopter.

“Part of me wonders if I’d just focused on Sergeant Lee, would there have been a different outcome?” Plemons said. “We’re taught to triage, we’re taught to put them on the side if they’re expectant, but out in the field we can’t do that. A large portion of my job is a morale and confidence thing—they know I’m with them and I won’t quit on them, no matter what.”

Plemons and I were standing in the sun, in an open area by the tent and chairs where the service had just been held, the service that is always held for fallen soldiers. The dead men’s boots, rifles, helmets, and dogtags had been placed before the assembled company, and the first sergeant had begun calling roll, and when he had come to Delapena and Lee and received no answer he had repeated their names several times. Then the bugler had played taps. There had been a twenty-one-gun salute. And then, one after another, the company’s soldiers had walked forward and saluted.

Plemons was tall and skinny and good-looking, with light brown skin. He had joined the Army late, at twenty-seven, after discovering that his master’s degree in writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro didn’t make him employable. “I wanted to pay off some debt and also be part of this war,” he said. “Whether it’s our war or Obama’s war, I’m kind of glad the focus is on Afghanistan. Not so much fighting war as providing security. I believe in the United Nations and NATO and the diplomatic side. It’ll take a couple of generations for real progress to come about.” His attitude made him “what the Army calls a liberal douche-bag—a term of endearment, I guess.” He went on, “A lot of guys here are eighteen, nineteen years old. They were twelve years old when 9-11-2001 happened. They’re ready to be warriors, they’re young—part of it’s posturing. They want to make a difference in the way they can, and the way they were trained to is to fight.”

Plemons had been one of the speakers at the service. I had been struck by his remarks. He had said that soldiers had “dual lives” and had to hide one of their identities from their loved ones, “like superheroes.” He had concluded, “We cannot be swayed by feelings that could corrupt us: feelings of guilt, anger, and revenge. In the end, grief shall not take us, and we shall remember.”

Later, in the plywood tactical operations center, I spoke with Charlie Company’s commander, Captain Jason Adler. He was thirty-three years old, from Redwing, Minnesota. He had served in Ramadi, Iraq, during a period of intense violence in 2005-6. “This is a very different war here,” Adler said. “The enemy here is much harder to find than in Iraq. There were a lot more of them there.” He had an economics degree from George Mason University, with a “fighting minor.” Unlike some of the younger soldiers I met, Adler didn’t mind that the level of violence in Afghanistan was lower than in Iraq (though getting close). “I’m fine with that. I’ve exercised my minor in Iraq, I have no issues with that.” He also had a new son, his first child, which changed his tolerance of risk. Adler was trying to think through this elusive enemy, to grasp some tactical advantage in the struggle for what he saw as the center of the war—Afghanistan’s young, unemployed men, whom the Taliban paid fifty dollars to plant I.E.D.s. “I’m honestly still trying to understand Afghanistan,” he said.

Our conversation in the makeshift headquarters was interrupted by the screening of an Army video that had been sent to all the combat outposts. It was about suicide. For twenty minutes or so, soldiers and parents and spouses and chaplains and psychologists talked about the reasons why servicemen and -women took their lives. The recurring theme was isolation: the film urged soldiers to talk to one another openly and sympathetically. The antidote to suicide was camaraderie. I wondered if these solemn entreaties would strike any of the combat veterans around me as “soft,” but everyone was listening in complete silence. Afterward, the company first sergeant, a stocky weightlifter with snuff under his lip, went around the room and asked everyone to say a few words about how he could make sure Charlie Company didn’t lose anyone to his own darkness.

I asked Adler how his company had taken these two deaths. “The men are really resilient,” he said. “They’ve held together pretty well. These are numbers fourteen and fifteen for me since I’ve joined the Army.” He smiled slightly. “The American soldier is a pretty impressive young man.”

At the memorial service, Adler had been the first speaker. “Nothing will bring back our brothers in arms,” he had said. “But we can go on fighting for our nation, and for each other.” His emphasis was on the last three words.